Location intelligence has evolved. It’s not just longitude and latitude anymore — it’s context, says David Bairstow, VP of product at Skyhook. It’s the intersections of billions and billions of mobile devices processed against known locations — from airports, sports stadiums, and college campuses to coffee shops and Burger King — and it means a revolution at the intersection between customer intelligence and mobile advertising targeting.

Brands know more about their consumers than anybody else. They know when consumers are on their properties, whether it’s at their physical location or in their online store — but that represents just a fraction of that person’s day.

“Location data helps brands understand their customers when they’re not spending time with them,” Bairstow says. “If Burger King is the brand, they know a particular customer likes Whoppers or Quarter Pounders with cheese, but does that customer also spend a lot of time at Chik-fil-A?”

The technology has become sophisticated enough to deliver the kind of precision required to detect that not only is a customer nearby, but that they’ve actually pulled into a gas station, and they’ve stopped — a perfect scenario in which to deliver a targeted, engaging message. And these kind of marketing and advertising scenarios have always been the promise of location intelligence. But that sophistication also means that marketers can leverage this new facet of customer data by building it into other channels as well.

“Just because it’s coming from mobile location data, doesn’t mean that the only kind of delivery channel is a realtime location-based trigger for a message,” he explains. “If you can learn a lot more about your customers by understanding who they are, what their preferences are, where they go, where they spend their time, then you can build it into a broader, smarter marketing campaign.”

He offers Skyhook’s recent study for a high-end clothing brand, identifying mobile devices as a proxy for people who had visited their stores and analyzing the captive audience data, exploring the common behaviors and traits among all those whoh have visited this store.

When they compared the behaviors of the group that visited the target stores to the broader panel of 50 million devices, they found that these shoppers over-indexed dramatically, Bairstow says. They were like 10 times more likely to visit high-end yoga studios, high-end gyms, and the top at-leisure brands.

“It was a real epiphany for the store,” he says. “With those insights they are now experimenting with working with some of the brands their consumers associate with, as well as building real-time messaging based on when a customer is having another experience which has an association with their own brand.”

Cutting the creep factor

But how do you manage the risk of driving consumers away — or having them refuse to give up their data, and consent? You go back to the basics: delivering value, which needs to start at the beginning of customer engagement with a request for permission to use their location data.

Permission rates vary dramatically depending on the type of app and the trust that people have in a given brand. If the SPG Starwood Rewards app asked to use a customer’s location, that customer understands intuitively how that data might be used when they’re traveling. If it’s a social app or similar, where they can’t immediately see why you need their location, they’re going to say no more often than yes, Bairstow explains. They need to see an explicit value exchange — for instance, ‘I want your location so I can give you offers when you’re near one of my stores’ which provides an explicit benefit to the customer.

“I think there’s a spectrum in terms of what brands should, or need, to give to customers to make them feel comfortable with their use of location data, because ultimately it’s a value exchange,” he says. “It’s, ‘I’m going to give you a better experience because of it,’ or the big one, ‘I’m going to give you money,’ if it’s coupons and promotions.”

To learn more about the customer intelligence breakthroughs that companies like Deloitte and Skyhook are developing, and how to garner location-based insights that supercharge your CRM system and help you build a more powerful marketing plan, don’t miss this VB Live event!